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Racial profiling or racist olicing? Bounds testing in aggregated data

Racial profiling or racist olicing? Bounds testing in aggregated data
Racial profiling or racist olicing? Bounds testing in aggregated data
State-wide reports on police traffic stops and searches summarize very large populations, making them potentially powerful tools for identifying racial bias, particularly when statistics on search outcomes are included. But when the reported statistics conflate searches involving different levels of police discretion, standard tests for racial bias are not applicable. This article develops a model of police search decisions that allows for nondiscretionary searches and derives tests for racial bias in data that mix different search types. Our tests reject unbiased policing as an explanation of the disparate impact of motor-vehicle searches on minorities in Missouri.
0020-6598
959-989
Hernández-Murillo, R.
d73876fc-5427-4e39-9c2d-0c6eeb1379d7
Knowles, J.
8746baa8-b940-41a4-8175-8ca27bed468d
Hernández-Murillo, R.
d73876fc-5427-4e39-9c2d-0c6eeb1379d7
Knowles, J.
8746baa8-b940-41a4-8175-8ca27bed468d

Hernández-Murillo, R. and Knowles, J. (2004) Racial profiling or racist olicing? Bounds testing in aggregated data. International Economic Review, 45 (3), 959-989. (doi:10.1111/j.0020-6598.2004.00293.x).

Record type: Article

Abstract

State-wide reports on police traffic stops and searches summarize very large populations, making them potentially powerful tools for identifying racial bias, particularly when statistics on search outcomes are included. But when the reported statistics conflate searches involving different levels of police discretion, standard tests for racial bias are not applicable. This article develops a model of police search decisions that allows for nondiscretionary searches and derives tests for racial bias in data that mix different search types. Our tests reject unbiased policing as an explanation of the disparate impact of motor-vehicle searches on minorities in Missouri.

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Published date: 2004

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 55064
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/55064
ISSN: 0020-6598
PURE UUID: 7110d2df-5e80-493e-894d-2de939510c4c

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Date deposited: 31 Jul 2008
Last modified: 15 Mar 2024 10:52

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Contributors

Author: R. Hernández-Murillo
Author: J. Knowles

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